The nature of American politics 27cities. The result was the concentration of the underprivileged, the poor and
the less well educated in the great cities of the North and East. The propor-
tion of the population of the United States living in cities of over 100,000
people rose from 12.4 per cent in 1880 to nearly 30 per cent in l930, during
which time the total number of people living in such cities shot up from
6 million to 36 million. Here was the raw material for the transformation of
the political system of the United States into something very different from
that of the sectional alignment of 1896, but one in which geography contin-
ued to play a part.
The Great Depression of the 1930s was the catalytic agent that trans-
formed this vast mass of human beings into what came to be called the ‘nor-
mal’ Democratic majority. Samuel Lubell has shown that it was Alfred E.
Smith, the unsuccessful Democratic candidate for the presidency in 1928,
before the Depression actually began, who first drew the political battle lines
between the cities and the rural areas. It was the New Deal policies of Fran-
klin D. Roosevelt, however, that fixed the urban masses of the North and
East in the Democratic column. In 1924, in the twelve largest cities in the
United States, the Republicans had an overall majority over the Democrats of
1,252,000 votes. Twenty years later, in the same twelve cities the Democratic
majority over the Republicans was 2,296,000 votes. This enormous change of
allegiance represented, in Lubell’s phrase, the revolt of the underdog. Eco-
nomic, ethnic and religious factors combined to create a body of support for
the Democratic Party that broke the hold that the Republicans had had upon
the presidency, with short breaks, since the Civil War. The urban masses
of the North became one prop of the Democratic Party, in uneasy alliance
with the southern whites who used the Democratic Party to maintain white
supremacy in the southern states. This remarkable coalition, the New Deal
coalition, papered over the deep ideological cleavages between Northern
and Southern Democrats. They came together because historical accident,
and the already existing organisational structures, provided both wings of
the Party with an unprecedented opportunity to exercise power. This was
the basis of the Roosevelt system that set the pattern for American politics
after 1932 for thirty years. The northern wing of the Party dominated the
presidency, while the southern wing gained a strategically vital position in
Congress, in particular by its control of committee chairmanships. The presi-
dent and the Congress came to have different ‘constituencies’ because of
the methods of their election. To gain election to the presidency a candidate
had to woo California and the great populous urban states of the North and
East, while Congress was more representative of, and more responsive to,
suburban and rural interests. The resulting tension between president and
Congress on a wide range of policies became, because of the coalition nature
of both great political parties, a great source of internal strife within the par-
ties as well as between them.
The years since the end of the Second World War have, however, brought
a new complication to this pattern of urban–rural politics. The rapid